Went to the 3 Barron's Renaissance Fair Anchorage AK yesterday with my new camera. Would love ALL comments please, still learning. My first mistakes were thinking there was going to be more sun so I had my Polarized filter on the whole time and I tried taking the pics wearing my sunglasses. So, I think I over exposed the pics because I was trying to check my composure and adjusting the settings with the sunglasses.

This was under a covered area, I think I should have increase the exposure a notch, what do you think?

I enjoyed slowing the shutter for this and the swords below

Again, something about this says the colors don't snap, what do you think?

I like the Renaissance ladies

I loved shooting this little girl, she was so cute and looked like she was having so much fun, got a bunch of her and her friend

I was upset with this. I adjusted the exposure to get a 2nd shot to bring out the back of the shop but I didn't pay attention that the lady in the front moved so she blocked part of the back I wanted to bring out. Even though it will look funny with an extra butt in the picture I might just do it anyway for fun

A friend of ours working in the living history display, she didn't want her pic taken, I think it turned out cute

I cropped out the audience heads at the bottom of the pic. I think I needed to adjust the f/stop to get both guys in focus. They would talk thru the move then do it. So, I focused on one guy then moved my aim between them and took the shot as they moved towards each other.

I'm confused. I'm just looking at the EXIF data for the first picture - Purple Hair. I though there was a bit of camera shake going on, with the shot at 110mm

You're shooting at just after midday, there's plenty of light, you're shooting the lens wide open or near enough at f5.6, your ISO is at base 100, your shutter speed is 1/50th second! That's one dark polariser you've slapped on the front of the lens. Are you sure it's not stacked with anything else?

As a rule I'd look for the reciprocal of your focal length as a minimum shutter speed to get better sharpness. In this case you'd be looking for around 1/125th second of so to give a little better crispness to the shot.

As for your questions about colour punch and saturation, welcome to my world. As in living in dust! A little processing will help sort that out. But first we've got to sort out what filter(s) you're sticking on the end of your lens!!!

I was shooting in either Program or Shutter Priority the whole event. The filter is a Zeikos Multi-coated CPL. No, I wasn't stacked, made sure of that. I know Zeikos is a cheep brand??

I have heard "reciprocal of your focal length as a minimum shutter speed" before. what exactly does that mean? I've been trying to figure out my shutter speed when I'm doing normal shots. I'm good when I want to blur or freeze motion.

That means that if your focal length is 100mm, you'll want to be shooting at a minimum of 1/100th of a second hand held. Obviously you may have image stabilisation to help out but that's a good rule to stich to in order to get sharper shots.

If your shutter speed is getting slower than the reciprocal of your focal length, you've got a few options. Either up the ISO, open the aperture (stop down) to let more light in, or hold your breath and take a few shots in a burst to try to get a sharp result.

I personally would shift to aperture priority for this event. Let the camera take care of shutter speed and auto ISO if required once your slowest shutter speed is reached. Either that or just keep an eye on your shutter speed and dial in extra ISO if and when required.

Firstly, I think you did a very good job with your self-critique/analysis in the original post.

Secondly, while it's only a rule of thumb, if you're going to use the reciprocal of focal length guideline, you probably want to factor in the 1.6 crop of your T2i. e.g. 100mm lens = 1 / (100 x 1.6) = 1/160

I noticed you mentioned the colours not being accurate and vibrant a few times. While DSLRs do take better pictures than a typical Point&Shoot, there is some work that needs to be done in post-processing to really make the image pop.

What I suggest is to always shoot in Raw + L. If you don't care much about the image, the .jpg will be useable, but if you really like the image and want to do post-processing, you should do it on the raw file.

Typical things that can be done is to adjust contrast / hue / saturation, and adjust the color curves (RGB). You can do a pretty good job with this in Canon's Digital Photo Professional which comes on a CD with your camera. Obviously an expensive software like Photoshop will give you more options.

As for the image that's half-dark, half-light, if you load it up in Photoshop, you can create a duplicate layer, light it up, then create a mask so the bright version is only visible where it needs to, and you use the original version for the parts which are already bright.

I second Jean-Pierre's comments. I'm shooting in the Middle East and there's always dust in the atmosphere. The light is always 'flat' as well. By that I mean that if I look at my histogram there is never much of an even spread in tones to the image. PP is virtually always necessary to some extent. With these images, a bit of contrast and vibrance/saturation tweaking should get the colours back to how you 'saw' them.